Chapter 145: Media Storm

Anya's POV

My phone hasn't stopped buzzing since six a.m.

I wake up to eleven hundred notifications and a headline that makes my stomach drop before I've even had coffee:

Hockey Heir's Scholarship Girlfriend, Everything We Know About Anya Reyes.

Scholarship girlfriend. Like that's my whole name now. Like the years I spent studying in library corners, the essays I rewrote a dozen times, the nights I worked the diner shift until my feet ached, all of it collapsed down into two words designed to make me sound like a headline instead of a person.

I sit up in bed and scroll before I can stop myself, which is a mistake, because the article's already been shared four thousand times, and the comments are worse. Gold digger. She's definitely after the money. Bet she planned this whole thing.

Someone found my old yearbook photo. Someone found the diner where I used to work weekends and is asking if I still do. Someone screenshotted my financial aid application, I don't even know how, I don't even know if it's real and it's spreading faster than I can process.

My hands are shaking by the time Levi calls.

"Don't read it," he says, before I even say hello. "Anya. Don't."

"Too late."

"I'm coming over."

"You don't have practice in"

"I don't care." His voice is tight, controlled in that careful way that means he's furious and trying not to show it. "I'm coming over."

I should tell him not to. I should say I'm fine, that I can handle it, that I knew what I was signing up for the second I let him say my name into a microphone in front of half the city's press. But the truth is I didn't know. Not really. Not this.

He shows up twenty minutes later, hair still damp, looking like he ran every red light between his place and mine. The second I open the door he pulls me in, and I let myself fold into him for exactly four seconds before I pull back, because if I don't, I'm going to fall apart, and I don't know how to fall apart in front of someone who's never had to.

"They found my old job," I say. "The diner. They found my yearbook photo, Levi. They're calling me a scholarship girlfriend like I'm, like I'm some kind of con."

"I'll get it taken down."

"You can't get the internet taken down." I laugh, but it comes out cracked instead of funny. "That's not how this works. This isn't your world where you snap and people fix things."

Something flickers across his face, hurt, maybe, or the beginning of an argument, but he doesn't take the bait. He just watches me, patient in a way that makes it worse, because I want him to be angry too, I want someone else carrying some of this weight.

"Talk to me," he says instead. "What are you actually feeling right now. Not what you think you should feel. What's real."

I sit down hard on the edge of my bed, phone still clutched in my hand like it might bite me again. "I don't know. Both things. I feel" My throat tightens. "I feel proud, weirdly. That you said it. That you didn't hide me. That part of me feels like I finally exist in your world instead of the edges of it."

"But."

"But now I'm not a person to these people. I'm a storyline. I'm 'the scholarship girlfriend,' like my whole life is a plot twist in yours." My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate it, hate that I'm crying in front of him again, hate that this is what the last twelve hours have done to me. "I worked so hard to be more than where I came from. And in one night, the entire internet decided where I came from is the only interesting thing about me."

Levi crouches in front of me, taking both my hands like he's trying to anchor something that's spinning too fast to hold.

"You're not a storyline," he says, low and certain. "You're the person who stayed up till two a.m. helping me study for a chem test I was about to fail. You're the person who noticed my hands shake before games and never once made it weird. None of that's in their article, because none of it's theirs to have. It's ours."

I want to believe him. Some small, exhausted part of me does.

"They're not going to stop," I say. "Even if this dies down, there's going to be another headline. Another photo. Every time we're seen together, it's going to be a story instead of just, us."

"Then let them write stories," Levi says. "As long as the real one's still ours behind it."

I laugh again, wetter this time, half a sob folded into it. "That's very poetic for someone who almost got suspended for slamming a guy into the boards last season."

"I contain multitudes." He brushes a thumb under my eye, catching a tear before it falls, and something in his expression goes softer, more serious. "I know I did this. I know standing up there and saying your name out loud is the reason your inbox looks like a warzone right now. If you want me to walk it back, say it was a mistake, cool things off publicly until it dies down, I'll do it. I mean that."

The offer sits between us, and for one terrible second I actually consider it. It would be easier. Quieter. I could go back to being invisible, unremarkable, a name nobody outside our school has ever had to learn.

But I think about the way it felt when he said girlfriend into that microphone like it wasn't a secret to manage. I think about years of making myself smaller so I'd fit into rooms that were never built for people like me.

"No," I say, surprising myself with how steady it comes out. "I don't want to disappear. I just... I need to figure out how to exist like this. Loud. Visible. Without losing myself in what they decide to make of me."

Levi's whole face changes, relief and something fiercer underneath it, something that looks a lot like pride. "Then we figure it out together. I'm not going anywhere, Anya. Storm or no storm."

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, and for the first time since six a.m., the buzzing of my phone on the nightstand doesn't feel like the only thing in the room.

He does.